Employee of the day

Last month this blog received its 30,000th visit and I wonder if that’s a good enough excuse to talk about the blog a bit.

If I think the goal here is to get readers to write better musicals, the upshot is when I see an inept new musical, I’m likely to think “Arrrgh: I wish they’d read my blog.” And it should be just the opposite; I should see a really good new musical and the authors say “Thanks, Noel. We got a lot out of reading your musings.”

Ah, well. I’m only half-serious about that goal. There are other places to go, if you want to learn to write musicals. And if I were fully serious, I’d write a book. The original idea here – and it came from the late, great Mark Sutton-Smith – is that I have so many thoughts about musical theatre, they just ought to be jotted down somewhere. That 60,000 eyes have been cast upon them is just stunning to me. That nobody seems to have figured out why posts here get inappropriate titles is stunning, too, but less so. And the Easter Egg thing – that clicking any photo leads to an illustrative video: few are aware.

Stephen Sondheim is not quite as brilliant as people seem to think he is.

Now, there’s something about that less sentiment: it bothers a lot of people. And what irks sometimes gets people to read more. In the current on-line environment, the subject of a piece gets called “clickbait” when it provokes like an itch, drawing eyeballs (fingernails?) in.

(The internet’s filled with oddballs. Recently, one guy reacted to my insistence that perfect rhymes be employed by saying my exhortation would inevitably bring about the death of musical theatre.)

So, what kind of musical are you writing? Are you compelled to toil for ages on a show because of some artistic impulse within you? I’m sure we all know a writer – perhaps a poet – who fills pages without any expectation that anyone will read it. The opposite would be the creator who cares about pleasing the audience, not himself. And that’s just a bad place to be: “I don’t like this crap, but the public will.” A few years ago, a lot of wise folks encouraged me to write a show about a subject I’ve always found a bit icky. Others don’t find it icky, though, and there’s reason to believe there’d be a market for such a show. Dutifully I wrote, until my lack of love for telling the story stayed my hand.

I can’t think of an example of the other, of me writing a musical out of an uncontrollable urge to sing from my soul. The ideal is a combination of the two, a tale you’ll enjoy telling which you believe an audience will embrace. Of course you can misestimate the public. And then you have a flop. An earnestly believed-in, authors-poured-their-heart-in, flop.

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 14th, 2016 at 6:41 pm and is filed under teaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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